Replies

That is part of it. Part of it is the obvious fact that something can't interact strongly with outside things until it attains a certain size, power, or influence. Part of it is the fact that Islam originated orally among a basically illiterate people. There is, however, an additional reason that needs to be understood, to be properly skeptical of early Muslim accounts but not to throw them out entirely.

That additional reason is the fact that Muslims claimed legitimacy for various practices on the basis that those actions were traditional, accepted ways of doing things. It is how Muslim law worked - precedent was the key concept. Muhammad was effectively recognized as a source of legislation. What he had taught, done, or tolerated in others of his time was regarded as sanctioned. Nobody else was recognized as having a right to legislate. They were supposed to be following a law they got from him that he got from God, not their own preferences.

Now you have to see both sides of what that has to mean for later positions on his sayings and actions. First, no one would have bothered trying to legitimate anything in this manner, unless there was a great mass of accepted practices that were uniform and agreed on this basis. You don't legitimate something by claiming some nobody that no one cares about said it was OK. Whole peoples don't hit on the same nobody that no one ever cared about to ascribe actions to him. Great bunches of people had to be agreeing to do all kinds of things because and only because Muhammad had taught those things, or there would be no motive whatever to claim he had taught this or that.

Then, second, once that is established - *what* gets ascribed to Muhammad is very much up in the air. Because it is possible for people coming later to merely allege that he did or said such-and-so, in order to get it accepted as legal. You can't graft a new law onto a non-existent tradition. But if you do have an existent tradition, you can indeed graft new laws onto it, by falsifying accounts of previous actions.

With all of the traditions just oral, not collected into one place or written down, it was relatively easy for new ones to slip in. So and so told me that whosits told me that Muhammad did X, and so and so and whosits were wonderful guys, don't you know, they'd never tell me something that wasn't so, therefore X is permitted. In that chain there are three people who could just be making it up - or who may have recast something real in their own way, as they understood a previous principle, whatever.

By the time you are looking at a codified and centralized, written end result a century and a half later, there will be all sorts of things in that mass of accounts. There wouldn't be such a structure of tradition in the first place, if -all- of it were made up things, added later. There never would have been anything to add them to, anything deferred to already by masses of people. But of each -particular- item, it is possible it was an innovation sometime in that 150 years, rather than really being there in the time of Muhammad.

The principle of legislation by precedent, then, tended to encourage falsification of earlier history - while also encouraging lots of attention to earlier history, to be sure. That tradition was used this way proves that there already was a tradition and a body of thought, Islam. It does not prove of each proposition you care to name, one after another, that it already was part of the body of thought called Islam. Some are so central they are beyond serious question - the God of Abraham without any other, Muhammad as prophet, a day of judgment, required prayer, etc. Many lesser points could have come in any time later.

Traditional Sunnis deal with all of this by simply accepting an eventual outcome, as codified in the Koran on the one hand, and various compilations of hadith (narratives) on the other. How much ongoing legislation they continue to allow then turns on how they handle legal principles like precedent (latest or earliest? e.g.), consensus (of the present or the time of Muhammad?), analogy (what is the principle of this hadith? how does it generalize? e.g.), and what role they leave to the opinion of the judge (equity vs. "original intent", etc).

Four different traditional schools of law formed around different sets of answers to those questions, and different compilations of hadith. Shiites, meanwhile, don't trace law to such traditions but to some living authority, in effect put in the role of Muhammad as a living legislator. Recent literalists try to get away from the instability of legal scholarship on the one hand, and authority on the other, by appealing solely to the text of the Koran, and to hadith compilations about the time of the first four caliphs, before the Sunni-Shia split. They then want every Muslim to judge for himself based on those texts alone.

The last is very important in all of this. Because it means the literalists are appealing almost entirely to the period when Islam was least known, certainly to the period before it was all written down. A fact, however, they are unwilling to acknowledge, being literalists. They regard themselves a copying a golden age explained in texts they regard as infallible and contemporary with that age. Actually, it probably never existed in that form.

It would be a little like Englishmen trying to copy the legends of Arthur instead of following the Magna Carta or the common law. They think that by disapproving of principles of later legislation they can avoid instability. They wind up actually following a fictional utopia read back into the period we know the least about. They think they are avoiding the causes of later splits in Islam. Actually, they follow back-dated work-arounds of later winners, without the accompanying systems of thought those were based on (legal schools, theological positions, etc).

From a modern western point of view, the most hopeful period doctrinally is the relatively early Abassid period, when much of the legalistic stuff was codified, but in addition there was a lively interaction with and digestion of other learned traditions. The enlightening caliphs of the period around 750-850, their courts and their scholars, were interested in every sort of thought, from Greek philosophy to Christian theology to Zorastrian and Indian religion. It would be a much better period for them to be emulating. It is not full religious tolerance, let alone liberalism or democracy, but it is an intellectual and open period.